Month: May 2015

Debbie has been actively involved in e-learning since mid-1990—when she moved from being a traditional educator into the e-learning space—and never looked back. Debbie’s focus is on the application of quality driven outcomes through stringent project management processes in the development and delivery of online learning. She is a firm believer that digital learning delivery doesn’t need to be difficult. Read on for one, big example of how to keep things clean and easy.

If I had a dollar for every time…

I meet with prospective clients and they ask me whether our LMS will integrate with a business system that is of high importance to them…well, I would have paid off my mortgage by now. Actually the TVC delivery platform offers far more than a learning management system (LMS), but for the sake of keeping things simple today let’s just say we are talking about whether or not we can integrate an LMS and another business system. The short answer? Yes – absolutely yes!

Why the need to integrate?

Businesses don’t want important data sitting separately in several databases. It’s messy, a bit of a headache and wastes time and money. Are you nodding in agreement? In the case of registered training organisations (RTOs,) we are usually talking about integrating a student management system (SMS) with our delivery platform (that includes an LMS). This is because the SMS is the place where all student information is recorded when a student enrols, including course name and dates. Without integration into the LMS, clients would need to manually add student names and teachers would need to create courses and add the relevant students to the courses. Not only is this an unnecessary waste of time in a time-poor education sector, errors can be made during such manual processes.

How does integration work?

Integration from an SMS to an LMS usually means that each night or early morning all new students who have been added are rolled over into the LMS automatically. Some integrations include enrolment into courses and, in a few cases, the integration process actually creates the course shell with the students already enrolled.

What about student results?

The next level of integration would be to push the student results back into the SMS. Since the SMS is the key area that auditors review, the LMS seamlessly provides the evidence required as part of an audit. Suddenly your job becomes so much simpler.

What else is possible?

Just about anything really. Our Moodle-based LMS has the flexibility to integrate with many systems. HR systems are an obvious integration option, where the LMS stores business critical information about staff. If you’re not sure, simply ask us.

Share this:

Sarah Phillips is a Senior Educator VET Assessment Specialist at Chisholm Online. She specialises in developing assessments for the online environment and has a background in e-learning that stretches for ten years. If you are thinking about developing your own online course materials, Sarah can help you avoid some common issues and pitfalls.

Online course development – where to start?

So you have decided to develop your own online course materials. Good for you! But before you commence, it is important to know what you need in order to achieve this successfully. There are a number of decisions your management team needs to make before you start employing people to start work.

Here are a few questions to ask yourself;

How many courses will you be developing?

How many people will your budget allow you to employ?

What do you want done in-house and what can be sent to external contractors?

But the most important question is…

What functions do you need filled in order to develop a suite of courses?

When developing course materials, it is important to understand the functions required in completing the tasks, but it is just as important to understand that functions are not people.

It is a common misconception that hiring a team of instructional designers can achieve all you need in the process of developing materials. It is also a common misconception that all instructional designers have the same skills. Position titles in the education sector are often defined by the organisation they are employed by, and just because candidates were called instructional designers, educational designers or learning designers in their previous employment, doesn’t mean their idea of what the role entails is the same as your needs. Such candidates might be skilled and dedicated employees, but does that mean they’re right for the role that you have in mind?

What are the skills needed to develop online course materials?

To understand this, we first need to understand the functions of developing and delivering an online course:

Content writing

Assessment writing

Editing and proof reading

Storyboarding

Multimedia development

Compliance

LMS or CMS management

Facilitation and assessment

What type of people have these skills?

Online course development needs people who:

Understand what the training packages and units of competency are really asking for

Understand the industry they are producing content for

Understand how to write for VET qualifications

Write clear and explicit instructions to the students

Understand pedagogy and how to minimize cognitive load

Have attention to detail

Are competent in multimedia development

Have good design skills

Understand the impact of their design on the facilitation process

Understand accessibility, access and equity, copyright

Have problem solving and creative skills to identify strategies for overcoming the limitations that online delivery can expose.

A team that covers all bases

It is unlikely that you will find all of these skills in a single employee, so it’s best to create a team of competent individuals with different but complementary skills. Rather than employing a whole team of instructional or learning designers, the functions required to develop online vocational education and training (VET) courses could look more like this:

A subject matter expert (SME)

A content and assessment writer

An instructional designer (ID)

A multimedia developer

An education technologist (Ed Tech)

A trainer/assessor

The importance of compliance and assessment

When developing courses for the vocational education and training (VET) sector, having staff that understand compliance and the impact it has on their role is essential. Instructional designers may have excellent skills in developing well designed learning materials, but:

Do they know the industry for which they are writing?

Do they understand the compliance implications in relation to their work?

Or are they simply good at visual design, user experience and multimedia development?

You also don’t want to fall into the trap of assuming a trainer can write assessments. It is a very meticulous process that requires a solid understanding of pedagogy, industry and compliance, and someone who has a passion for teaching won’t necessarily understand what is required in the development process.

Staying focused

Never forget what functions are required when meeting your deadlines and budget. While it is nice to have dynamic people who can bring new qualities to your offering, make sure you stay to the scope of your project. It can be tempting to let the skills that you need currently be compromised by employing someone who has skills you would like to use in the distant future. If your budget doesn’t allow for the time it takes to dabble in gamification or other more time intensive approaches, these people will be left doing tasks that are not their specialty, and will be left feeling underemployed and mislead. This can impact upon morale and leave you with a high rotation of staff and extra costs using up your budget.

Say it how it is

It is important to be explicit in your position description when hiring for your team. You need to make sure that the people you hire can in fact do what you require of them, but first you need to be clear in what functions you need filled, and how you will divide those functions between employees. Be clear in your needs and expectations so that you can recruit appropriately, develop brilliant online content, and live happily ever after.

Do you need a hand with your content development? eWorks takes the time to understand your needs and match them with a team of skilled professionals. Contact eWorks today to get started.